This week, justArts spoke with Clayre Benzadon ’17, who has been organizing a series of poetry coffeehouses in Cholmondeley’s coffeehouse.

justArts: How did you become interested in poetry?

Clayre Benzadon: I started seriously writing when I took a creative writing class in high school, and it was a very difficult class. I don’t know if I enjoyed it, but I did so much work in the class that I felt like I had to continue this kind of hard work. Then I realized that there were workshops at this school, and I [was] a midyear, so I started late in the [year], and I saw they had these classes, and I was super scared — I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take [one]. Then I took it, and I fell in love.

JA: Were you the one who started organizing these events?

CB: It was actually an [alumnus], Rohan [Narayanan ’15] — he graduated two years ago, and he started the open-mic culture on campus. I don’t know how I found out about it — I guess through a couple of friends; I got invited through social media — Facebook is a great tool for poets, especially nowadays. I just started going to the events, and signing up, and I started talking more to Rohan about how he started and how he planned to keep this up. The responsibility kind of just came down from Rohan.

JA: What’s it been like being the organizer?

CB: It’s been really hard. We had Nellie [Spener ’17] last semester, and she’s abroad now. We never had clear instructions on what to do, and we had the BPA [Brandeis Pluralism Alliance], thankfully; they’ve been really helpful with funding and publicizing events. But really, it was all just kind of us in the front of everything, so trying to [promote on] social media, inviting as many people as we could, organizing Chum’s space, which is really hard because they’re not very good with organization. Mostly, I think the hardest part is social media — trying to really get people to go. Our last event, unfortunately, it rained out, and we were really excited because we were expecting a huge turnout. We had everything prepared; during break I set up everything — we had to fill out these papers, and all these different organization things involved, and it’s just like a whole process.

JA: What do you hope that the attendees of these coffeehouse events get out of them?

CB: I really just want to bring a whole diverse group of the campus [together], that would be an ideal thing. Just getting everyone to know about these events and know that they have the safe space to express themselves freely. And it’s not limited to poetry — that’s the other thing I’d like people to know, there’s music and dance. I would love to see that in our future performances.

-—Lizzie Grossman